Four Poems From Ray Succre

Cornerstone Telecast

Polarity jogs the signal a-twitch,
reds and greens and spectrum disturbances,
the feed scrambled.

No soppings of worry scramble me; I am seven,
alone, with sandwich and remote.

There it is. The channel. Reds and greens.
She begs but it's just her job.

She is sealed in jittery frame, breasts electrical,
face contorted, back-humped and a-twitch.
Disturbances approach her from the corners.
I decode the jolts. I raise volume to seven.
I am a spectrum. I am voltaic.

She is filtered in chatty cohorts, detergent men.
They switch and corral, clutch and shudder,
crashing the watts from her, dimmer, dimmer.

She thanks them but it's just pretend.

I finish my sandwich watching them complete
theirs, and then flip to the melees of superheroes.


One Into the Sidewalk

The red, alarm, ruckus of skin
bridges a stream from low-sky,
this cell water, air water, the red,
alarm, down the arm in strands
twine-shot, with horse-necked
espiances making a sport of advice—
“Dangerous activities need gear.”
“You’ve no helmet; what of your
brain and eyes?”
“Bleeding arm! Bleeding arm!”
This thin dirt coughs up for drops
like gasping ovate mouths—
“And where are padded elbows?”

Craned arm in twisted frame
carrying gore, trotting home,
rear wheel waving rotation,
and the blood, the itch,
another instant red, alarm,
make a sport, make a matter,
make another instant red;
spanked and spat down,
the wrecks are preferred.


Skin of the Bookcase

The air is imparticled.
Hunched in gorilla posture,
lifting a feathery monster
and gingerly dusting the sod
of a little blackened tomb,
dusting sees a shady grove:

The effect of your breathing,
carbeuration, pushing
spitbreath down the strangle
into milk, and the books
can not but in a furnace
be more dead; the ends
are chipped, roughed, scored.

That any solve of dust
by a sweep cleans the dead
from these things is absurd.

Open a masterpiece
at the middle, find a nervous
system frigid and hailed on.
Strangle. Languish as they
have done on shelves.

The bookmites hide
in the spine as you
cleverly turn the page.


Tom's Palace of Coins

She gives him the small coin or ant or boar,
during new-transformed, day-out's drive,
a haughty, fat-assed rape or adventurous sty.

"Here's some money for a candy, Tom."

Much in threats roving his grandmother most,
a bare passion glancing mere resemblance,
her loose change given slow as
once so perfect poison downward raids
to sensual, digestive bits of awe.

Before, by course of age, he sleeps
with the errands of his intribunal era,
he'll wear little insignias and ebbing emblems,
stack the ants and coins in a blink of walls,
building a small palace out of the useless,
tiny flecks of currency.

Look what he enspheres:
Palace people. Palace depth.



Ray Succre lives on the southern Oregon coast with his wife and baby son. His poems have appeared in Aesthetica, BlazeVOX, and Pank, as well as in numerous other journals across as many countries. His novel Tatterdemalion was recently published by Cauliay Publishing. Mr Succre maintains the blog: http://raysuccre.blogspot.com.